Born in Arizona on November 24, 1897, the Hopi artist Monroe Quamahongiva Frederick showed a precocious talent for painting. While a student at the Phoenix Indian School in Phoenix, Arizona, the work of the teenage Frederick caught the eye of Edward E. Ayer. According to a newspaper article found in the Ayer manuscript collection, entitled "Indian Boy is Ayer’s Protégé: Noted Ethnologist Regrets He Did Not Visit Phoenix Sooner When He Sees Remarkable Work at Indian School," Frederick was commissioned by Edward Ayer to complete these paintings and watercolors. It reads, "Some years ago Mr. Ayer secured a large collection of Burbank’s American Indians, the finest paintings of the sort probably in existence. He arranged quite unexpectedly yesterday to add to this collection of Indian pictures. He visited the Indian school and there saw a painting of an Indian with a bow and arrow, kneeling. It was the work of a sixteen-year-old Indian boy, who at once became a protégé of Mr. Ayer. On the completion of his studies at the Indian school, Mr. Ayer will take the boy to Chicago where is will be given a training in art. Mr. Ayer commissioned him at once to paint fifteen pictures for him at $75." The description of the painting referred to in the article matches the painting [Left Profile of a Man on One Knee with a Bow and Arrow in Hand Wearing a Headdress], found in this collection. Frederick, the artist's anglicized surname, spent his adult life living within the Hopi Indian Reservation in Navajo, Arizona, where he died in 1985 at the age of eighty-seven.